Irish social thought and the relief of poverty, 1847-1880

This paper investigates the way in which the ‘problem of poverty’ in Ireland was encountered, constructed and debated by members of the Irish intellectual and political elite in the decades between the Great Famine and the outbreak of the land war in the late 1870s. This period witnessed acute social upheavals in Ireland, from the catastrophic nadir of the Famine, through the much-vaunted economic recovery of the 1850s–1860s, to the near-famine panic of the late 1870s (itself prefigured by a lesser agricultural crisis in 1859–63). The paper focuses on how a particular elite group – the ‘Dublin School’ of political economists and their circle, and most prominently William Neilson Hancock and John Kells Ingram – sought to define and investigate the changing ‘problem’, shape public attitudes towards the legitimacy of welfare interventions and lobby state officials in the making of poor law policy in this period. It suggests that the crisis of 1859–63 played a disproportionate role in the reevaluation of Irish poor relief and in promoting a campaign for an ‘anglicisation’ of poor law measures and practice in Ireland.

Religious Geographies in Ireland: Pre-Famine, Post-Famine, Pre-Partition

This paper examines changes in religious geographies for Ireland from 1834 to 1911. It shows that in a period of dramatic social and economic change religious geographies remained remarkably stable. In this it challenges the accepted historiography. It makes use of new data in new ways with the full exploitation of the 1834 Enumeration of Religion and, in so doing, is able to examine the impact of the Great Irish Famine on geographies of religion. These data are visualised both using traditional choropleth maps and, more innovatively in this subject area, cartograms.

Translational Contestation of Religious Concepts: A Case of Conversion Narratives

Drawing on a case study incorporating two opposing conversion narratives and their translations, thispaper explores the relationship between language, religion and translation. By examining linguistic,paralinguistic and paratextual framing techniques used by authors, translators and publishers, itdemonstrates that translation can be a powerful means of contesting fundamental concepts – such as “conversion”, “church” or “faith” – in the processes of safeguarding one’s own or challenging another’s religious identity, especially in the context of asymmetrical power relations.

Measuring workforce segregation: religious composition of private-sector employees at individual sites in Northern Ireland

In this paper I examine the scope of publicly available information on the religious composition of employees in private-sector companies in Northern Ireland. I highlight the unavailability of certain types of monitoring data and the impact of data aggregation at company as opposed to site level. Both oversights lead to underestimates of the extent of workplace segregation in Northern Ireland. The ability to provide more-coherent data on workplace segregation, by religion, in Northern Ireland is crucial in terms of advancing equality and other social-justice agendas. I argue that a more-accurate monitoring of religious composition of workplaces is part of an overall need to develop a spatial approach in which the importance of ethnically territorialised spaces in the reproduction of ethnosectarian disputation is understood.

Thought insertion: Abnormal sense of thought agency or thought endorsement?

The standard approach to the core phenomenology of thought insertion characterizes it in terms of a normal sense of thought ownership coupled with an abnormal sense of thought agency. Recently, Fernández (2010) has argued that there are crucial problems with this approach and has proposed instead that what goes wrong fundamentally in such a phenomenology is a sense of thought commitment, characterized in terms of thought endorsement. In this paper, we argue that even though Fernández raises new issues that enrich the topic, his proposal cannot rival the version of the standard approach we shall defend.